


No More Dreaming of the Dead as if Death Itself Was Undone

by dynamicsymmetry



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Corvo the Black (Dishonored), Father-Daughter Relationship, Heavy Angst, High Chaos Corvo Attano, Masochism, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Relationship(s), Post-Dishonored 2 (Video Game), Psychological Trauma, Torture, political science popping up in odd places
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2019-08-24 13:00:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16640606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: For the good of the Empire, out of love for the Empress, Corvo Attano takes the throne in a cloak of blood and lies. The worst lies are the ones he’s telling himself. What he’ll do to atone for them will cut into the heart he no longer has, and before it’s all over he’ll learn what ruin truly means.





	1. so darkness I became

**Author's Note:**

> I finished the Corvo the Black ending the other day and of course my brain eats angst like candy, so this happened.
> 
> Something I absolutely love about writing fic for games like this is the opportunity it affords to explore the psychology behind the canon you make specifically for yourself. In the moments before Corvo assumes the throne, his mind is a total black box—why would he ever _do_ something like that? It seems so out of character for him, so what would his reasoning be, and what would it actually do to him? Those were fascinating questions to me and the game really doesn’t provide any answers at all. Which is of course why fanfic exists, and here we are. 
> 
> A couple of the tags and the rating are somewhat anticipatory - they don’t yet come into play in this chapter - and the rating itself will definitely be changing; the M is more a warning than anything else at this point. 
> 
> Mood comes from [Florence + The Machine’s “Blinding”.](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Da6bBKLPEGg)
> 
> Really hope you like this. Thanks so much for reading and please let me know what you think. ❤️

He looks at her for a long time.

Hours, it might be. Days. A hell of years. On his knees where he fell when Delilah’s shattered paradise sealed itself behind him, sword a foot or so away from him. Tumbled out of his hand. He let it go. Its edge glistens with blood, a shining slash along the bottom of his field of vision.

The room is cavernous and silent. Bands of dark and light. One of the shafts of light catches the gray slate of her and silvers her hair, her shoulders, her outstretched hands. She's reaching for him. She was furious when Delilah locked her in stone, ready to kill, but now her contorted features look so much to him like fear.

All this way to save her. All this blood.

_Drowning in it. In every drop you spilled._

He shoves himself, groaning, to his feet. Every muscle feels torn, every joint lined with arthritic broken glass; he's heard a mocking _old man_ more than once on this nightmare journey but he never _felt_ it until now. He feels more than old. He feels ancient. Centuries, more, old as the stone of the Tower, old as its foundations. He's been here forever, keeps going around and around in the same wretched circle, and he never learns and he never gets away.

Fifteen years ago he soaked Dunwall in blood. This time it was Karnaca. And in the end of course he's right back here. Same fucking story. The black-eyed bastard said as much: Another Empress he couldn't save.

Except he did. Didn’t he? She's right here. Hands extended toward him, the fear on her face now transformed to pleading.

_Father. Please._

_Help me._

Barely inches from her, he halts. Looks at her for another eon. Somewhere between his knees and here he recovered his sword, and he glances down at it, at the blood congealing. Blood already congealed and caking the hilt. He did his best to clean it every time he got back to the Wale but he never quite managed to get all of it and it's been a long, long night of murder, and the bloodlust is still singing in his veins like a distant leviathan, low and mournful and threatening.

He can stop. He can stop now. It's all right. He can stop and he can reach out to her and touch her, set her free.

He lifts his hand—and the Mark flares, not blue but pure and terrible _white,_ and all around it is a sea of red, a storm rising to crash down on her, and Jessamine’s voice is a hopeless wail in his ears, until it melts into another, rich with scornful laughter, and he feels no shock at hearing it because he knows better than most how little death actually means.

_Why, you pathetic, self-deceiving old fool._

_Did you think she'd be pleased with what you've become?_

He turns his hand palm-up. The same light that cast Emily in filigree catches him, and turns the blood staining his fingers to black ink. He was going to touch her with those fingers. She was going to come back to him with that blood smeared across her cheek. She was going to look into his eyes and see… what?

She knew he did hideous things. She already knew that, she never gave him any reason to believe that she didn't understand. He'd had no choice. Utter ruthlessness had been the only way. They were all traitors, down to the lowliest guard, and they stood between him and feckless, faithless monsters, and the only thing he could have done was cut them down like grain, he did the best he could with an impossible situation and she _knew_ that, and she never blamed him. Never.

_But she was a child then. Children are boundlessly forgiving when they want to be. She would have forgiven you almost anything, because you came for her. You always came for her. In a world gone mad, you were the one thing on which she could depend, so she looked past every crime, every sin, every time she hugged you and smelled death on you, every time she saw rats scurrying in your footsteps, every time she saw the blood under your fingernails. Fathers are perfect in the eyes of their children, when those children are still small. Fathers are saints and gods. You could have slaughtered an entire country in front of her and she would have forgiven it all. She wouldn't have thought there was even anything to forgive._

_Her childhood was a long time ago. If you lead her out of this room and she sees what you did, here and in Karnaca, with the eyes of a grown woman…_

_She’ll see something very different now._

He slowly lowers his hand. His gaze flicks past her, lands on the throne and is locked there.

_You can keep her safe like this. Always know where she is, always watch her. You can make things better, make the awful choices for her, complete the necessary purges, spare her the horror of what's still to come. Then, when all’s well, when the Empire is ready for her, you can make it fully right, wash your hands clean and touch her and give her back her life. This isn't her mess. She shouldn't have to clean it up._

_It doesn't have to be forever._

_She’ll understand. She’ll forgive._

When he sinks down onto the throne and the room rattles around him, the vines and leaves withering away to nothing and leaving only broken stone behind, he would swear he feels chains sliding around his wrists.

~

Later he will have the workers move her statue to the side of the throne— _his throne,_ stars no, never that, never fucking that—and he will watch them will all the cold intensity of a bird of prey for any carelessness, any slip. They don't speak about what they're doing but he can feel it coming off them in waves, their confusion and vague horror. For a brief moment as they set her down, he muses on having them all killed when this is done. Better that they not talk, even about what's self-evident. But all he has to do is look into their frightened eyes and he knows they won't dare say a word.

Everyone knows the Lord Protector— _the Lord Regent_ —won’t dispatch assassins. Everyone knows he prefers to take matters into his own hands. See the job done right.

Once she’s in place and the workers have been dismissed, he sits and stares out at the empty room. There will be receptions. There will be speeches. There will be no coronation, of course, but he supposes there'll have to be some sort of ceremony for him to have any shred of legitimacy. He’ll suffer it for her.

All for her.

He can't see her from this position. Not even in the periphery of his considerable vision. He's aware of the subtle hypocrisy in this, that he swore to always watch her and now he's placed her in such a way that he can't do so, but he brushes it away like a troublesome fly. He won't quibble about semantics. It's the principle that matters.

When they rebuild the rest of the throne room, he orders them to cover her with a thick protective tarp. It's possible that he leaves it there for longer than strictly necessary.

~

The ceremony is brief, as are the speeches. He's never been good at them and he's not going to try. There are fewer nobles than there were, so many having fled and not yet returned and many more sending their regrets; they have other engagements that they can't possibly wriggle out of, they express their sincere apologies and best wishes and provide lavish gifts.He has these thrown into a storage room and doesn't look at them again.

Again, he considers—not with any intention of following through, naturally—who he might kill, this time for their rank disrespect to the Empress.

He directs bouquets and wreaths of flowers laid at her feet. This looks far too much like some kind of memorial and he regrets it, grits his teeth and is grateful that for most of the proceedings he doesn't have to see it. But all their eyes are on her as they raise their glasses in salute to the Empire and the Empress and the honor of the Regent. He can't hope to ignore it. They're all _looking_ at her and what he sees is the exact same confusion and dawning horror that he saw in the eyes of the workers.

In the midst of his remarks about his primary interest in the wellbeing of the nation and the need for rebuilding before the time when it'll be safe for the Empress to resume the throne, something brittle in him nearly breaks and he comes so close to hurling his glass to the finely woven carpet and screaming at them that _they don’t understand, they don’t understand what he’s been through, what he's had to do for her and for them and for the Empire, just to hold it all together, just to put it back together when it was all falling apart seemingly beyond any recovery, that they have no idea how deep the sickness in this place really goes but he's seen it and he knows it and he knows what it takes to carve it out and cleanse the wound and none of them would ever fucking lift a finger because they never have and not one of them has the spine, no one but him, and she’ll forgive him when he finally brings her back, they’ll see, she’ll understand even if none of them do, and if they so much as murmur dissent he’ll mark their names and when she’s Empress again she’ll use him to make them all pay._

No. No, she's Empress now. She always will be.

In any case, he hears this almost-tantrum in the voice of a petulant child and drones on.

When it's over the sense of relief is palpable, as if everyone releases a sigh at the same instant. They disperse. There's a feast in the banquet hall. For his part, he retires to his chambers, and sits on the edge of his bed and stares blankly down at his hands, where he's clenched them into fists so hard the corner of his ring has cut into his finger.

Blood on his hands.

~

There are fireworks when the dusk sets in. He didn't request them, didn't want them, did not in fact know they would be happening. He curls in on himself and jams his hands over his ears. Every single one of them is like a grenade exploding in his head.

~

For three nights after the ceremony, he doesn't sleep. For all the days after that he’ll be lucky to get more than a few fitful hours. This won't impair him; he's never needed much.

But it's very lonely, living a life half shrouded in darkness.

Even though he’s keenly aware—keen as the blade he keeps near even in his bed—that in that darkness, he's never truly alone.

Black, cold eyes. Faithful. They never leave him.

 


	2. everybody lets you down

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I was like “You know what this fic needs? More stuff about staffing. It could really do with more stuff about government and staffing.”
> 
> I don’t think it’s boring or anything (boy I hope not), it’s just funny given what I’m building toward.
> 
> ❤️

No one is eager to come to the court of the Lord Regent.

Corvo doesn't much care about this, despite a gnawing feeling that he should. Almost from the moment of her coronation, Emily practically had to have the guards turn people away at the door—and in fact, while she didn't, her father did. Not at the actual door but before that, answering fawning letters of introduction and petition with politely terse refusals. He's never been good at speeches and he's also never been especially good with letters, either; _too informal,_ he's sure Emily’s parade of governesses would have said, their long noses lifted to the heavens. _Oh, to be sure, he has more than the vocabulary he was, well, born to. But he's clearly had no proper tutoring. There's no grace, no elegance. Certainly no tact. Why, he just_ _comes right out and_ says what he means, _if you please._

But it was going to be him. Damn it all to the fucking Void, he was going to be the one to respond personally to each of them. He was the door between her and the rest of the treacherous, backstabbing world, and he and he alone would be the one to open or close, to admit or deny. Stars knew he let enough snakes in anyway, once he established their potentially beneficial points and deemed their fangs sufficiently blunt.

He hated politics, precisely because he was under no illusions regarding how the game was played. And as it turned out, tact or no tact, he played it tolerably well.

It helped a great deal, being willing to spill blood when the spilling was called for, or to threaten the same.

It helped also to be absolutely believed when the threats were subtly made.

Emily Kaldwin the First never wanted for courtiers. Not even when it became obvious that her Protector and Spymaster—and it was increasingly pointless to even pretend her father was anyone else—wasn't prepared to tolerate even the hint of an attempt at manipulation aimed at her age and inexperience. It was the way of power: as a game, it drew players like bloodflies to a rotting corpse. He had learned that truth at the side of a previous young Empress and none of it surprised him. He knew it as well as any of them, if not better. To a very great extent, it wouldn't have mattered what manner of Empress Emily was; they would have come. They couldn't not.

But it does matter, now that it's him on the throne. He understands perfectly well why they stay away.

The ones who do try to come?

Well.

He's seen them before too. He knows them almost before he sees them face to face, before he so much as opens their letters, as if the witchcraft that allows him to perceive glowing forms through the walls allows him to see into the hearts behind the hands that held the pens. As if he can see beyond the bland faces of couriers and messengers to the scheming minds that directed them. As if he can sit on the throne and look at the prim, bowing diplomats and cut them open with nothing more than his attention, slash them from throat to crotch and pin them down under a magnifying lens like one of Sokolov’s vivisected plague rats.

The ones who came to Emily were bad enough. These are far worse. These are Slackjaw and Paolo with fine clothing and grand houses and _good family names._

And not all of them are even that respectable. They see an opportunity, one that might never come again, and they're grabbing for it. He does let some of them in, out of bored curiosity more than anything else, and as they take their places at the banquet table and stroll through the ballroom, talking in tones they clearly suppose are too low to be heard over the oddly tuneless duet of the harp and grand piano, he flits through the shadows of the heavy drapes and creeps around the wainscoting, once or twice crouches on top of the chandeliers, and he can hear them just fine.

He thinks about when he paused in the act of cutting his way to the Dreadful Wale, out behind the pub, listening to the Hatters talking about how much money there was to be made off Delilah’s coup. About how there were advantages in the city falling apart.

Talking that treasonous shit in the seconds before he slit their throats and left them to choke on their own blood.

He watches and he listens. And he runs his fingertips lightly along the edge of his blade.

~

He makes it through a week of this before he kills the first one.

Later, he doesn't even remember what she said to set him off, to switch him over into another mode. He knows only that it happens, that she leaves the Tower one night to return to the Estate District and he follows, Blinking from rooftop to rooftop and alley to alley, and when the people in the street thin out enough he waves his hand and yanks time to a halt, sprints past her escort and leaps into her carriage and twists her head almost in a full circle. Stabs her in the throat for good measure.

He doesn't have to do this last. She's already dead by then. He notes this excess with cool detachment and has already disregarded it at the instant time rolls forward again. He's leaping from balcony to balcony by the time the scream of her surviving guard breaks open the dark.

No great loss. The world is better now.

One step closer toward the Empire he promised her.

~

He doesn't wash off the blood before he visits her. He stands before her, studying the dark marble lines of her face; the chandeliers are set at low light and none of those lines are clear. As if to establish them with more solidity, he very nearly touches her, snatches back his hand at the last moment. Exhales heavily. He almost ruined it.

Blood on his cloak and fingers. This time, too, he would have to explain it to her. Dunwall Tower is no longer a slaughterhouse, the hallways and chambers cleaned and repaired and put in order, but that doesn't matter.

It's still not right. Not yet.

He never should have let that filth in here to begin with. She would be disgusted with it, and moreover she would wonder where his previously high standards went. She always found even the comparatively inoffensive nobles tiresome at best, and these would make her recoil. Killing the one was repairing an error, but the repair never should have been necessary.

He’ll probably have to clean house a bit more.

He won't have to tell her. He won't even have to mention it. By the time he's ready to bring her back into her Empire, everyone else will have moved on.

But.

 _I’m sorry,_ he whispers, his blood-tacky hand twitching at his side. _I’ll make it right. I swear it. You’ll see._

~

There's also the problem of staffing.

He had a front row seat for this difficulty after Emily’s coronation, when they set about picking up the pieces. So many dead, the loyal officials already banished by Burrows or executed on trumped-up charges, and the remaining ones questionable at best. Professing their commitment to the new regime, of course—but it didn't take him long to root out who was telling the truth and who was merely trying to save their own skins.

Not many of the former. And it didn't go well for the rest.

About some of them he consulted Emily first, and the times when she looked solemnly up at him and shook her head, he was certain that while they never said it aloud, they both knew what she was giving him permission to do.

She had to know.

So in the end it wasn't that difficult. He came out on the other side with few doubts about his decisions. But then they had to find new people to fill the vacant positions, and their loyalty had to be evaluated in turn, and it took far longer to do that part than it had taken to clean house, with far more complicated deliberations.

Now he's there again. And now it's harder than it was.

Delilah was ruthless. Burrows purged; Delilah absolutely _decimated_. Barely even a skeletal government remains. Parliament scarcely exists in any practical terms, and filling its seats seems difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few of the most capable of the noble families remain. It's just like the court: he goes to address the new Parliament—every muscle clenched and his blood seething with disgust—and he rises to the dais in the grand chamber and looks out at the faces of schemers and snakes. Blood-suckers. Liars. If he still had the Heart, if he could summon her to whisper their secrets to him. But merely studying them, he knows enough.

There's nothing to be done. He has to bear it. He has to rebuild for her, put things back the way they were. They need a government. They need officials. They need a Parliament.

_Don't they?_

_I’m doing what I have to do,_ he whispers to her in the thin dawn light, after a night of slipping silently through the darkest places in the city—tonight he slept two hours before midnight and then no more. He's not in the throne room but in his own bedroom, his eyes fixed on the glass ceiling overhead; he's constructed a perfect simulacrum of her face in his mind. _You’d understand, if you could see. You remember how it was before. It was a long time ago and you were so young but I know you remember. It’s not pretty but it’s getting done. And it’ll get better._

_Sleep, sweetheart. By the time you wake up it’ll be better._

~

But he wonders if she's actually sleeping.

He tries very hard not to wonder any such thing. The possibility that she's not is far too unsettling. That on some level she's aware of her own imprisonment, lost in silent stony darkness, utterly alone and unmoored from time—or keenly embedded in it, marking each day and hour and minute and second.

How could that do anything but drive her mad?

Or she might be aware of everything. See and hear it all. She might have seen the moment he almost touched her and then turned away, went to the throne and took it from her ( _he did, he took it, he holds it now_ ). The fear and pleading he saw on her face might not have been his imagination. She witnessed his ( _betrayal_ ) choice and she's witnessed all his choices since then. Was present for the ceremony where he claimed his third title. She's been howling mutely and uselessly for him to release her, and he's refused every time.

No. That can’t be the case. She must be sleeping. Sleeping and dreaming, and stars willing, the dreams are good ones. She sits and listens to Jessamine read to her from histories of exciting wars and naval battles, the less terrifying of Sokolov’s accounts of Pandyssia. She plays hide and seek with him in the garden and finds him every time. She fences with him wielding sticks, and rides on his shoulders to watch the launch of a ship. Jessamine sings her to sleep in her low, tuneful voice. In Emily’s dreams, the past is remade and all is well.

 _You’d like to believe that,_ whispers a voice, and it's as if the jagged edges the world abruptly shatters into are speaking to him. The floor sheers off to either side, and the walls are unsupported. Nothingness breaks through the cracks, floating islands of that nothingness made solid in the distance. The distant moan of a whale. Perched on the top of the throne, black eyes bore into his. They've always been devoid of light, devoid of even reflection, but now they glitter.

Corvo stares at the Outsider as every muscle goes rigid and numb.

 _You’d love to. I know you would._ The Outsider’s tone is rich with undisguised amusement. _I know you try. Sometimes I think you even succeed. It's fascinating, watching that struggle. Then againI'd expect nothing less than fascination from you._

“Get the fuck out of here.” He wishes his voice wasn't trembling. But it is. Like the world around him, jagged at the edges. “You bastard, I'm done. We’re done.”

 _Oh, we aren’t anything of the kind._ The air around him blurs and flutters and then he's standing beside Emily, bending, peering close. _I know, you know. I know whether or not she's sleeping. Whether or not she knows what you're doing. Would you like me to tell you?_

He doesn't move.

He's not entirely certain that he _can_ move.

Meanwhile a slender bone-pale hand is reaching toward Emily’s marble cheek, a strong curiosity on his face and in his movement, and that's when Corvo suddenly moves. Blinks across the space between them and does what he's never done, never so much as contemplated no matter how maddening the Outsider’s teasing and taunts got.

The back of his fist stings white, and the Outsider reels back, that slender hand flying to his jaw.

Corvo knows his own strength. A living man might be spitting blood.

The Outsider is nothing of the kind.

And he's smiling. The bastard, he's smiling, lowering his hand and raising his head, a pleased smile curving his delicate mouth. His eyes are huge black pits.

 _Why, Corvo._ The Outsider flexes his jaw, miming a check for injury. _You really are full of surprises. I'll confess, I doubted you had it in you._

“Get the fuck away from her.” As if every word is a sword and can stab. “You so much as lay a fucking finger on her, I swear to the Void, I'll find a way to cut it off.”

The Outsider’s form once more blurs out of existence, blurs in to drape him lazily sideways on the throne. Corvo spins and his sword is in his hand; it wouldn't do any good, no matter what he threatens, but stars, wouldn't it feel wonderful to give it a try.

 _You’re swearing to me, then._ Low, smooth as a cat’s arched back. _You swear to the Void, it’s_ me _you’re swearing to. And you can swear whatever you like. But look. Look at yourself. Go to your rooms and find a mirror and take a good long look. Then go out and rule your Empire._ He shrugs. _Or don’t. Either way, it's up to you._

“It’s not mine.” Why, _why_ is he _playing_ this game? “It’s hers.” Corvo draws a slow breath. “It's all for her.”

The Outsider looks at him for a long time. Corvo resents the hell out of it, resents it with a frost-edged fire that sears his throat. Wants to turn away, turn in place, whirl in any direction at all as long as he’s not facing this monstrously thoughtful creature, but any way he turns, he knows, there the Outsider will be, looking and looking with those terrible black eyes.

Looking at him as if his skin and flesh are clear as glass. As if he can be vivisected like a plague rat, like those treacherous nobles, examined down to his very bones.

But at last the Outsider nods, and there's something hideously gentle in his eyes now and something equally gentle in his voice. Gentle as a broken neck.

_I believe you, Corvo. As I said. I believe that part of you believes that. I believe that you want it to be true._

_That's why this is so tragic._

The throne room snaps back into focus. The shreds of the world heal themselves. He reels, staggers, glances at his burning hand. Frozen and beseeching, Emily reaches for him.

He's alone.

 


	3. devils feed on the seeds of the soul

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, we're done with staffing and getting into the more fucked up shit, hooray. Probably smut after this! More hooray!
> 
> ❤️

He realizes, after they come for him, that he assumed they would come from the first moment he took the throne.

It's no great revelation. It's a moment of pure _oh, of course_. His utter lack of surprise. His smooth, unconsidered response. Much of that could probably be chalked up to years of training and decades of practice—isn't this what he's always done? Isn't this literally his _job?_ But it's more than that.

It's something that feels like welcome. 

He wakes and they're there: Four dark motionless shapes across the room, like holes in the world, the night pouring through. He’s already sitting up, the sheet cool in his fist—as if he was responding to their presence before he woke at all, which is possible if not likely. The air glides over his bare shoulders, his chest. He looks at the four of them and he feels the unseen pressure of their eyes, and he feels very calm. 

As one, they move. 

Into a pool of moonlight, milk and ink, and before they complete their first steps he's on his feet with his sword snapping open in his hand, waving his other in an almost dismissive flick of his fingers, as if he's shooing away a fly. Time slows to a syrupy ooze and he dances through it, all the old elegance returning to him as if it never left him at all. 

It was in him from the beginning, knitted into his bones, and that's why all those years ago in Karnaca he was able to win contest after contest until the prize was his, and he's never forgotten it in all these decades, never forgotten who he is. 

Never. 

Other things might be open to question. Other problems might gnaw at him. This is pure and simple, the way he easily side-steps the first and plunges the blade into their neck with a sharp twist that sends a lazy jet of blood into the air. The second, first their hand arcing into the air as his slice severs it at the wrist and then their head following a crawl of seconds later. The third with a simple slash to the gut, gradually spilling a coil of intestine. The fourth… 

With the fourth, he waits.

In the seconds of rapid movement he has left, he blinks to the top of the chandelier and crouches, watches as time unlocks itself and the bodies fall. The remaining one staggers and whirls, and now Corvo can see that they're masked—naturally—but he doesn't need to see their face to sense their terror. Breathes it in like perfume. 

He gives them long enough to understand what he's done. The totality of their failure. What's about to happen. 

Then he calls the rats.

In the end there are no bodies to dispose of. Only some unpleasant stains to clean. He has two maids shampoo the carpet in the morning. They know at a single glance from him not to say a word. 

~

But he does sit on the throne for much of the day after, gazing at the little scrap of bloody cloth he holds in his hand. One of the few pieces the rats did leave, though they did good work as they always do. The throne room is empty; he had it cleared and locked. He needs to think.

The cloth: Beneath the stains, gold embroidery on black velvet. He feels a tight wave of mingled exasperation and amusement. Stars, even their assassins apparently can't resist the drama of the identifying accouterments. The sheer arrogance of it, of letting themselves be known that way, doesn't surprise him any more than the fact that they came for him at all.

Although this part of it… If he's honest, yes, it is slightly surprising. At least that it happened so soon.

But he could never mistake this symbol. No one could. Out of fear, out of devotion.

Out of black, murderous hatred.

That evening, alone in his bedroom with a glass of excellent Tyvian red held lightly between his fingertips, he tosses the scrap of velvet into the fire and watches it burn until it's ash, silent and unblinking.

He's going to have to do something about this. The only question is what, and when. 

And in the meantime, he doesn't for an instant expect this to be the end of it. 

~ 

He says nothing about it to anyone. He's not inclined to confide much in anybody these days regardless of the topic, but especially when it comes to this, it strikes him that the most prudent move is to pretend it never happened at all. So he goes about his regular day-to-day business: Subjecting himself to the drone of advisors and counselors, holding court for the few hours he’s now willing to bear, hearing petitioners, disregarding most of them. Thinking. All the time, thinking. Studying every face, scrutinizing every movement. The minute adjustment of some deep inner lens turning the world to pulsing gold-purple-orange, the outlines of their bodies a dully shimmering glow. 

All these people. All these secrets.

This. This is exactly what he's sparing her from. This is what he's _saving_ her from. For his part, he can do what's necessary, no matter how ugly and how horrible. 

It’s what he's always done. It's what he's _for_.

~ 

Three months later, they come for him again. And this time he's not ready for it.

For their arrival, yes. He's been ready every moment of those three months. Through Rain and Wind and into Darkness, he's been in a state of constant readiness, but after this he’ll berate himself, curse himself for a fool that he didn't see it coming like _this_. Because he never spoke about it to anyone, but he knew perfectly well that it wouldn't go unnoticed at the Abbey when he appeared alive and the four sent to kill him never appeared at all, and it wouldn't take much deduction on their part for their nastiest suspicions to be confirmed.

Like burning an accused witch at the stake, if they had succeeded in killing him, they might have considered him acquitted. The fact that he survived is what's condemned him. 

A lethal failure of imagination on his part, not realizing that they would have spent the last three months preparing for what he proved himself to be. 

This time it's not his bedroom. Not anywhere in his chambers, not a hall or a corridor, not the throne room itself. Of course it's none of those places. Whether or not they planned the location, he doesn't know and doesn't care. The sheer obscene _audacity_ of it is enough to drive him into the rage that follows. 

The pavilion.

Night. Looking out at the sea, the fog hanging low over the water, the city a ghostly collection of gauzy, hovering lights. He isn't looking at her marker but he feels it like it's strapped to his back, crushing him second by second, and he can barely breathe. He hasn’t come here much since he took back the Empire and this is why, but he can't stay away altogether and tonight it's so much worse than it's ever been before. 

Her heart is dust. Her spirit is nothing. But she's right here. 

She's right fucking _here_. 

And for the denial of his touch, her daughter is cold stone beside the throne he took from her.

He won't. He can't. He's squeezing his eyes shut, hunching his shoulders beneath his cloak and he's turning to go, and that's when they come: Five this time, out of the shadows on all sides, and he's sighing— _not again—_ and raising his hand to stroke the world into stillness—

The music starts. 

It hits him as it always does—like the blows of a hundred fists against the inside of his head. He staggers, gasps, his sword faltering, and he's frantically searching through his blurred vision for the source of it, because he can't see any of the boxes, can't tell where the monstrous fucking noise is _coming from_ , and two of them attack at once, swift and vicious. 

The others follow. 

He's fought them off before, when they're armed with the boxes. It's not as though he can't. But before, his primary strategy has been to retreat and regroup before launching a counterattack, and this time no avenue is open to him. He can't Blink past them. He can't reach the magic at all. Even as he fights back a wave of nausea he dodges the first lunge and parries the second, turns the third aside and lands a slash across a broad back, but the edge of a blade travels from the corner of his eye down to his jaw and warm, slick blood trickles down his neck, and pain sings a duet with the hellish music in his head. 

It's not the fight of his life. But it's up there. 

Swordplay for him has always been that perfect balance between savagery and grace, a fluid, instinctive thing that requires no conscious strategy and in fact makes no room for it. He can't think. He can only act, his body everywhere and nowhere at once, and now it's as if half of that body is gone, amputated with a dull knife, and every movement is sickening. He thinks he might be doing all right. He thinks he might be bleeding from more than one wound. He knows he's in pain and the pain is getting worse. He believes he sees a body fall, and then another, and he manages not to trip over them. He spins and weaves, advances and feints, and all the time his marrow is _weeping_ for the Void, crying for it like a child ripped from the arms of its mother. 

He's not a child. He's so _old_. 

The gazebo shatters into jagged shards. Brutal light crashes in on him and floods his eyes and nose and mouth, fills his lungs with radiance. An assault of a hundred thousand stars, and he howls fury at them. 

If he could he would snuff out _every single one._  

And it's over. 

His boot on the man’s chest, the mask stripped away—revealing the wide, panicked eyes of little more than a boy. Disarmed and bleeding from the shoulder and side, dark hair matted with more blood, fingers scrabbling at Corvo’s knee. There's something about the surface he's resting his boot on. It appears through the music’s haze to be the boy’s body, but it’s not a human frame, not flesh. It's hard and angular, and when he looks down at it, he's nearly blind—and suddenly he understands. 

They found a way to make the box small. Small enough to be concealed by a shirt. Small enough to allow easy carrying and easy fighting, and small enough for him to miss until it was too late. 

He smiles and it feels like a scream. 

“Eat shit,” he breathes, and lifts his leg and his boot comes smashing down. 

~ 

After they took back the Empire for the first time, he had this room remade into something innocuous—something which, if you didn't know the truth of its history, you might never assume was anything else. He had the bloodstains scrubbed off the walls and the floors. He had the hooks torn free and the holes in the masonry filled, pipes and wires and whale oil tanks installed. It became a place of bland functionality. In time people forgot.

He didn't. 

And now, as he crouches and surveys the boy shackled to the pipe, it's becoming abundantly clear to him that you can never fully remake something like what this room used to be. You can never completely wash it clean. 

His hands. The hands he refused to touch her with. 

He slaps the boy. “Wake up.” 

The boy does, with a spasm and a soft cry. Corvo has cut his shirt off but left him his trousers—which he regards an undeserved kindness, but the most pressing matter was to divest him of anything else he might use as that kind of weapon. To be sure. 

He wanted to touch it as little as possible, but the box was impressive, even broken. Compact and slender, more like a book than a music box. How they miniaturized it, he has no idea, and he also doesn't especially care. It's beside the point. What matters is that he knows they can do it. He’ll figure out how to handle the rest of it later. 

There's an ugly purplish bruise in the shape of its outlines over the boy’s sternum and ribs. It's entirely possible that some of those ribs are broken. He takes cold satisfaction in it—that in the end, even by accident, he made their tool into his weapon. 

The boy swallows and blinks up at him. One of the lights on the side of a tank receptacle casts his features in half-red. 

Corvo traces his fingers over the blood crusted along his jaw, meditative. The cut still stings. “You're getting bolder.” 

“Such measures are necessary,” the boy whispers, and his face hardens with sudden and obviously forced defiance. He spits. “Witch.” 

Corvo grunts and wipes at the spittle on his chest with his glove. “You're going to have a difficult time of it, shaming me for something I’m not ashamed of.” 

“So it's true.” 

“You know it is. You wouldn't have come here, otherwise.” He nods at the broken box, discarded sadly in the corner amid a pile of rags and empty cans. No one will look for it there, and no one will know what they're looking at if they find it. “Wouldn't have brought your little toy.” He leans forward. “Why did you only bring the one?” 

Nothing. The boy juts out his chin, teeth slightly bared. 

The corner of Corvo’s mouth twitches. _Ah_. “You only _had_ the one. Didn't you? It cost the Abbey a lot to make something so small, and they only had one to send you with. Only one that worked, anyway. Is that it?”

Again, nothing. But something flickers behind the boy’s eyes, and Corvo regards him in thoughtful silence for a few seconds more before he reaches into the seething dark between worlds and crooks a beckoning finger.

Two rats scurry out of thin air. Only two. For now, two are all he needs.

“Tell me a story,” Corvo says, as casual as if they're seated by a pub’s fire sharing a drink, “or I'm going to feed them your fingers. One by one.” 

The boy’s gaze flicks from the rats as they sniff at his hand, to Corvo, and back again. “I have nothing more to tell you, witch.” He manages to sneer. It's pathetic. “Slut of the Outsider. They say you whored your daughter to him, and I don't doubt that it's true.” 

Corvo cocks his head, as if this is mildly interesting. 

The interior of his mind is an inferno. 

The boy doesn't scream when Corvo cuts the first finger off. He does scream at the second, and louder at each one after that. Louder still when Corvo gives the rats his tongue. His nose. His eyes. Cuts his stomach open and lets them play in his guts.

The boy doesn't say much else. That's fine. He was telling the truth, after all—It’s not as if he ever had much to say. 

~ 

Then, near dawn: Sitting in the bathtub, pink water swirling around him in the candlelight. His breath loud in his ears like storm-winds. Ripples like tides as he shifts his limbs. Bubbles like sea-foam. He imagines himself an island in a bloody ocean, his head a lighthouse looming in the night, his eyes great flashing lanterns warning every ship away. A man and a little girl are struggling at its very top, dangling over a precipice. Below it—not an abyss.

Below it is something worse. 

Maybe the little girl is about to fall and the man is clinging to her, trying desperately to save her. That might be possible. 

Maybe she's shrieking at him to _let her go_. 

 _I can't. I_ can't _, don’t you understand, you'll fall if I do._

But this little girl, she won't stop trying to twist out of his grip, and she's staring at the man like he's a _monster_ , her face contorted with horror and disgust and with something so terribly much like pity. And that last… It’s so ghastly, but it's remotely possible that the man sees that on her face and knows she feels pity most profoundly of all, and he tries not to hate her for that, and he does. 

What he's become.

 _Corvo._  

The water turns to steam and then to nothing. The dawn dies at the moment of its birth, and the room flakes away into ash. The tub splits into a cage of splintered bone. Inside that cage, on a slab of drifting rock, he's naked on his knees, wet skin prickled but too numb to shiver. 

The Outsider wavers and solidifies, bends and extends a hand through the bars. He's smiling like a sliver moon in the Month of Ice. 

 _It’s time,_ he says softly, and his smile widens. It's one of the worst things Corvo has ever seen in his life. _You've fallen far enough._  

_You're ready._

 


	4. when it's over you'll start

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this actually ended up going in some directions I didn't expect. I have a pretty clear idea of the outlines of where we're going to end up, but in terms of thinking about how to get from A to Z I ended up doing some interrogation (hah) of what's actually going on with the Outsider in this thing, and I realized events had to proceed in a slightly different order and along slightly different lines than I thought. 
> 
> I also just wrote a pretty lengthy thing (will post soonish) about the six months Corvo spent in Coldridge, and the writing of that informed this as well. 
> 
> Anyway, thanks as always for reading. ❤️

The Void is singing in his ears as the cage shatters again, weaves itself into chains of bone that wrap themselves around his wrists and jerk him upright.

It's sudden and hard enough to wrench his arms in their sockets and he grunts pain through clenched teeth as he stumbles and manages to keep his newfound feet. To either side of him, jagged spikes of rock stab into the air and weave slatey tendrils through the links of bone. The bone is singing too, the runes etched into its surface; he's bound with chains made of charms and they pierce his eardrums with their high, sweet, relentless song, and from the distance they're joined by the sonorous, mournful song of whales.

Shards of rock swirl and tremble. The Void spins. Or he does. He can't be sure. He squeezes his eyes shut and goes slack in the grip of the chains.

Waits.

_You're ready._

“For what?” he croaks, and he's surprised to hear his own voice so much sharper and more present than it usually is in the Void, despite its weariness. “What am I ready for?”

_You know._ The voice, not the face. The voice only. The form of the Outsider has vanished and the Void itself is speaking to him. _You've been wanting it for a long time. And it wouldn't be the first time. Do you remember Coldridge, Corvo?_

“I. I don't…” He shakes his head, shifts his arms and the chains bite painfully into his wrists. For six months he was in hell. There's a lot he doesn't remember, and he’s long suspected that it might be for the best, but there are some things, fragments and snatches, a scatter of broken glass that digs into his dreams. The final day is clear enough, for whatever reason, but before that.

Before.

(They don't beat him right away. They work up to it. When they do, they don't hold back. Burrows, Campbell—they ask, over and over, why he murdered the woman he would have joyfully died for. They demand that he confess and tell them everything. They burn him, go at him with pliers, hang him from a hook on the ceiling and flog him until his back is streaming blood and he can no longer walk. He gives them nothing but ragged yells which rise into screams. He doesn't have any words for them. His mind is a blank slate of pain, and the pain is so much worse than what's happening to his body.)

(It goes on and on. Long after he learns the truth from them, it goes on. Until it stops and someone puts a sword in his hand and he kills them all.)

But before.

_You could have asked them to stop,_ the Outsider says softly. _It wouldn't have made a difference, but you could have. A hundred thousand times, you could have begged them to make the pain stop. Even the strongest man would have broken and done it eventually. But you never did._

_Do you remember?_

He remembers. He remembers enough. He whimpers and his head falls between his aching shoulders.

What he did beneath the Tower, scarcely hours ago. What he did to that boy.

The Outsider is standing in front of him, slides two fingers beneath his chin and tips his face up. Corvo blinks the sting out of his eyes and sees that the Outsider is no longer smiling. He's never seen this look on that usually distant, usually coldly amused face. No distance and no amusement now. Cold? Perhaps.

But something else that he has no idea how to name. 

_You could have begged them to stop, and you didn't,_ murmurs the Outsider, _because you didn't want them to._

Corvo stares at him. Opens his mouth, closes it again, bites down on his tongue and it sparkles through his nerves. Whether or not the Outsider is expecting an answer to that, he has none to give, no more than he had an answer for Burrows and Campbell. They weren't asking him questions, not really, and this isn't a question either.

It's just true.

_I was there. Even then, I was there with you. You caught my eye long before I came to you, and I watched you. I saw you, Corvo._ Cool fingers combing gently through his hair. _I know you barely slept until they started hurting you, and once they did you slept like an infant. I walked through your dreams._ Flicker of a smile. _I even gave you some good ones_.

He doesn't remember those, any of them. It seems impossible that good dreams could have ever existed in that place. Impossible that they could have ever existed afterward. Since then his dreams have been either a silent black nothingness, or they've been this place, though whether those have been shades of the real thing or the thing itself has always been a mystery he didn't particularly care to solve.

But there were dreams. Her face was in them. Her body pressed against his, warm and strong and astoundingly alive. Her lips. The sun.

The wet stone is slick beneath his feet. His toes slip and he shivers and doesn't try to pull away from the Outsider’s awful touch.

_They said that you killed her. After a while you even began to believe it, a little. But when they first put you in there, even though you knew it wasn't your blade that did the work, you felt like it might as well have been. You failed. You wanted, so fiercely, to be punished for that. So you took whatever you could get. Those moments, Corvo, I watched you take yourself apart. It was incredible. I've never seen anything quite like it, in all the many things I've seen. I’ll confess something to you. I couldn't look away._

_Come back there with me now._

_Let’s go back there together_.

The first stroke slashes across his back and he screams.

He doesn't know what the Outsider is beating him with. Through the fog of pain rising in his mind he can't be positive that the Outsider is the one beating him at all—isn't that slate gray form still standing in front of him? Aren't those fingers still pressed against the top of his throat? But it must be the Outsider, because the Void is the Outsider and the Outsider is the Void, and nothing exists here which isn't a part of him.

The Outsider is beating Corvo with himself.

It's like the cane they used in Coldridge. It's like a hailstorm of the polished teeth of a whale. It’s like the dust in Karnaca solidified into vicious little whips, flinging itself against his naked skin again and again. His knees weaken, he cringes and can't move more than a few inches and it doesn't matter anyway—the chains grind and his hands swell with trapped blood as the singing bone links pull tight. The Mark. The Mark is on fire and it'll scorch through his skin and muscle and tendons and all the way down to his bones.

It already has.

Whatever is hitting him, it cuts through the air with a sound like a sharp whisper. It's lashing words into his flesh. His shoulders, the middle of his back, all the way down to the base of his spine. In Coldridge they didn't leave any part of him untouched. They stripped him as naked as he is now and spared him nothing. And he does remember that, in scattered and disordered fragments that make little sense: the first time they strung him up and truly went at him he heard a chant in his head that rose and fell on the waves of agony like a fully loaded whaling ship in a storm.

He didn't believe it was him, the one who murdered her. But he also did. It came to the same thing in the end, and it was why he was suffering.

_YOU KILLED HER YOU KILLED HER YOU KILLED HER YOU KILLED HER_

His knees finally crumple and his arms shriek in their sockets as his full weight hangs on them; at any moment they might tear free and dangle like the limbs of a broken doll. Yet it goes on, relentless in the rhythm of his cries, and formless lights dance through the Void and into his head. Surely if he's hurt here, he'll be hurt there. What is happening to him here is real and its consequence will be real as well. It's far more real than anything in the world he comes from.

_Don't you come from this place? Doesn't everyone? Isn't your heart full of the Void? Hasn't it always been?_

_Look at what you've done with it._

The hissing whispers surge to a crescendo, a wild flurry of blows. His thick cries turn watery and quivering and subside as his voice wears away to little more than a grating rasp. He can't stand it; no one could, not even someone who survived the worst of what Coldridge could do to him and the worst of what came after—but he doesn't plead for it to stop.

_You don't want it to stop._

His muddy vision clears, and the statue that is his daughter is at the edge of the rock, so close to plummeting into nothingness, her arms reaching for him and her face twisted. Lips parted. Teeth bared. Her chains are invisible. Her chains are in his hands.

_Father. Let me go._

_You lying bastard traitor, let me GO._

It's over.

It's not. The pain feels as though it'll never be over. His arms are full of glass splinters. His back is a mass of howling fire. He might or might not feel the cool trickle of blood; no one could be flogged as hard as he's been and not bleed, and it's easy to imagine his skin flayed away and the bars of his ribs and knobs of his spine exposed. He hasn't been a young man for a long time now. He's not strong the way he was then. It's not remotely outside the realm of possibility that something like this could kill him.

_It won't kill you, Corvo._ The Outsider bends and flicks the tips of his fingers, and catches Corvo in his wiry arms as the chains crumble to a shower of white dust, lowers him to the rock. Weakly, Corvo half-turns and looks up in time to see the massive, darkly undulating shape of a whale passing over him. Surrounding it, turning end over end, towers and streetlights and smoking chimneystacks, fragments of Dunwall sticking fast as barnacles to their islands.

_It won't kill you because that's not why we’re here._ His fingertips glide across Corvo’s cheekbone. _It won't kill you because that's not what you want._

He hears his own voice but doesn't feel his lips move. The sound issues from the center of his skull. This is how it usually is when he speaks in the Void, and there's some perverse relief in that perverse normality. _Why are we here?_

_Because I’ve never seen anything like you. Not Vera. Not Daud. Not even Delilah. They were all so special in their own way, but none of them burned as bright as you. None of them were as dark. None of them wanted to rip themselves to shreds the way you do, forever._ The Outsider sounds dimly wondering. _I have to see. I have to see what comes next. I have to be with you when it does._

_Go home now. Do what you do._

_I'll see you soon._

The Void folds itself up and expels him limply into the black.

~

There are no marks on him when he examines himself in the mirror. The only light is what pierces the windowpanes, colorless and grimy, inadquate to perform a proper study, but he's making no mistake. He knows all too well and all too personally what the fresh evidence of a genuinely terrible beating looks like, and all he sees are his scars.

Plenty of those. But faded and old. Like him. Exactly like him. Two sets of his eyes meet each other in the glass and he feels only heavy, weary revulsion.

It feels distant now, like most dreams do when exposed to daylight. He might pretend that it never happened. He might even succeed. But Coldridge did, and what came afterward did, all the blood and all the death and Dunwall teetering on the brink of annihilation, and there's what's happening now, what it takes to rebuild a world. What you have to do.

What you have to become.

In that terrible little chamber beneath the Tower, there's nothing left of the boy he tortured to death but a red smear and a few stray chips of bone.

He's dressed and in the hall when a pair of boots clicks at attention and he stops, turns.

“Excuse me, sir. Lord Regent.” 

He tips his chin upward, waves at the officer to go on. Her wide mouth is twitching nervously; whatever she has to say to him, it's not good, and it’s possible that she lost some kind of a gamble in order to be the one to deliver it to him.

“The Serkonan ambassador is waiting in your study. He has news for you. He says you should hear it as soon as possible.” Her jaw tenses. “I told him he should wait for you to hold court, but he said—”

He's already stepping past her, heading down the corridor without dismissing her. No, no way this is good, and far from any real apprehension he only feels a dry kind of resignation. The truth is that he's perfectly aware of the state he left Karnaca in, and he's been waiting for something like what this is almost certainly going to be.

The truth is that it was never going to go any other way.


	5. the way your world can alter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❤️

The Serkonan ambassador is new, and Corvo can't immediately recall his name.

They've spoken no more than two or three times; once the perfunctory ceremony in which he accepted the man’s credentials, and he didn't take any significant time then for a chat. The truth is that despite not knowing him well at all, he doesn't especially like the man, and for sure doesn't trust him—not that he truly trusts anyone anymore—and has been happy to forgo contact with him. One might expect the opposite, when it comes to the closest touchstone of his homeland in the whole of the city. But although his rich brown skin and thick black hair are Serkonan through and through, there's an air about him that doesn't feel genuine, as if he's pretending his own origins. He's short and rail thin, hollow-cheeked, his dark eyes sunken back into his skull. His teeth and fingernails are yellow from too many cigars. He looks unhealthy.

A patchwork government has knitted itself together since the death of the Duke, a battered and shaky coalition of officials and nobles and the remaining shreds of the military. The night he killed Duke Luca Abele, Corvo painted the walls of the Grand Palace red—only the servants made it out alive, and not even some of those—and the result was the near-decimation of Karnaca’s most powerful families, most of Abele’s cabinet and his closest advisors. There was no one in Karnaca who didn't, in one respect or another, draw their political power from him, and therefore they depended on his presence to hold onto it. So even the ones left alive after the slaughter were weakened, the foundations knocked out from under them. Not all of them were actually wealthy; some bore debts that swiftly crippled them, with no treacherous hand to prop them up.

Fuck them all. They had it coming.

He left Karnaca in a state of chaos, and the truth is that the fact hasn't troubled him more than any of the other problems he's currently dealing with. He has more pressing matters to attend to, and Karnacan silver was never more than an idle luxury in any case. Karnaca will sort itself out or it won't. It's far away. He doesn't live there anymore.

He told Meagan what he thought she wanted to hear, but it rapidly became clear to him while he was there: it's no longer his home.

The ambassador is seated on a couch by the window, munching on a pear; he drops it half-eaten onto the silver plate and rises, bows too low and extends a sticky hand. Corvo looks at it and doesn't touch it, and after an uncomfortable moment it falls to the ambassador’s side.

Corvo glances over his shoulder at the officer. “Leave us.”

She nods and ducks her head. The study door creaks and clicks shut behind her, and Corvo faces the ambassador again.

“I'm told you have news for me.”

The ambassador shakes his head, his expression twisting into a extravagance of worry and regret. “Ill news, my Lord Regent, it pains me to say. Very ill news. It has just reached me this morning. I came as soon as I received it.”

There was no reason to hide his distaste; there's also no reason to conceal his impatience. “Out with it, then.”

“Oh, but it is very terrible. The chamber of the Provisional Government, in Karnaca.” The man clasps his hands in front of him and licks his lips. His tongue is yellowish as well. “Bombed, my lord. Blown to smithereens.”

Corvo is silent as he takes this in. He's finding, as he absorbs it, that he's not shocked. It's not even particularly startling. The situation never struck him as sustainable. Something else was always going to come along and send the whole thing crashing down again, and perhaps nothing there will ever come together in any manner that proves sustainable.

He considers, again, the possibility that it was always going to go this way.

He steps away from the couch, strolls over to one of the bookcases opposite the desk, and scans the titles without registering them, as if he can locate some kind of sense there.  _Admiralty and the Fleet. A Treatise on Expeditions to Pandyssia. The Clans of Northern Tyvia. Observations on the Noble Families of Gristol. The Collected Histories of the Isles_ volumes one, two, and three (complete with maps, appendices, and plates of interest to both historians and laymen). 

_The Early Years of Lord Corvo Attano._

“Who did it?” he asks quietly.

“As yet we’re uncertain. We believe it to be either a pack of miner rabble-rousers or a new faction of terrorists calling themselves the Sons of Abele.”

“Sons of Abele?” He worries his lip between his teeth. Interesting. “Luca?”

“It's unclear. I doubt Luca. Trust me, my lord, no one misses him.”

Corvo grunts. This may or may not be a lie. Everyone who's spoken to him about this has been very quick to assure him that no one misses Luca Abele. That Serkonos was only too well rid of him, that Corvo did Karnaca a great favor in killing the libertine tyrant, that even a period of unrest is far preferable to his rule, and anyway, aren't the people free now to decide their own fate? Isn't this all to the good? Didn't he merely do what had to be done? The only man strong enough to take such brutal but necessary action?

“When did it happen?”

“A week ago, my lord. A ship arrived scarcely two hours ago bringing word.”

“How is it being handled?”

The ambassador clears his throat—he's much closer than he was, less than a foot away, and while Corvo isn't taken unawares, he shoots the man a look of sharp irritation. “A few of the ministers survived the explosion. They've launched investigations. But in the meantime there's unrest in the streets. _More _unrest.” He moves up to stand beside Corvo, half facing him, heavy brows pressed low together. “The barricades were never completely dismantled, but they say new ones are going up. There's tales of scores of killings. Things are bad, my lord. Bad and looking worse.”__

He stops, loose mouth still working slightly as if he might be preparing to say more. But there seems to be no more, and Corvo edges away, wanders to the globe in the corner and traces idle fingers across its gracefully curved face. The raised portions that form the Isles. The tiny bumps that denote the capitals. No gems on this map, but only bronze and carved whale ivory.

The smooth expanse of ocean between Gristol and Serkonos, between Dunwall and Karnaca. It feels like the span of a world.

“What do you expect me to do about it?”

For a moment, Corvo hears no response other than a faint, wet sound—his back remains turned but he can imagine what he might see, eyes wide and nonplussed, lips smacking with no words behind them. He knew, the second the ambassador told him, the rough outlines of why he was being told and what the man expected to hear, and the logic of it. But this man clearly hasn't been paying attention over the course of the last few months, because he clearly doesn't grasp the cold calculus according to which Corvo Attano the Lord Regent has been operating.

What he’ll do by brutal necessity, yes. But also what he won't do.

The directions in which he will not bend.

“My lord.” The _click_ of a hard swallow. Corvo gazes past the globe and out the window at the city, the steep angles of the rooftops and the thick towers of the chimneystacks, a swirling black cloud of crows that dives and wheels between them.

 _A murder. They're called a murder._

“Well?”

“I had thought,” the man starts, stumbles a bit, pushes on. “The surviving officials, the ministers… They have only rudimentary armed ranks at their disposal, not nearly enough to quell the violence at this rate, and many of those are suspected of having a hand in the attack. If you could spare any of the Navy… Even a regiment of your City Watch…”

The frame of the window is very smooth under his fingers, worn perhaps not so much by finishing and polishing but by precisely this kind of touch. Unbidden and so intense it nearly makes him gasp: standing in this very room when she received news of a fresh spurt of unrest in Morley, facing the window with her back to him, staring out at the sun dipping below the peaks of the roofs. It was a deep red through plumes of smoke, and it turned strands of her black hair the color of old blood.

Her shoulders were tense and hunched. She was leaning on the window frame as if it was holding her up. She was extremely pregnant then, heavy with it when she moved, and often tired. He loved her more fiercely by the day, by the hour as her time drew closer and closer, and when he entered the room at her call and saw her there it came to him that if he had the authority, he would send every ship and every gun at his disposal to erase Morley from the face of that globe, and release the tension in her body and ease the exhaustion of her mind and let her rest.

He thinks he might now have set his hand exactly where hers was.

That life died with her. But perhaps some things, some terrible things, survived. Because they had no other choice.

“Tell me, Ambassador Piras.” The name suddenly comes to him and he tosses it out as he might the chewed core of a pear. “When Gristol requested aid from Serkonos during the rat plague, did it send any?”

Piras begins to stammer, but Corvo continues with barely a pause, rolling over him in a monotone that sounds almost bored. “I know it didn't. I was there. I delivered the Empress’s message to Duke Theodanis Abele myself, with my own hand. He was a good man, I would never claim otherwise, but he said no. Do you deny that?”

Piras is silent. The aghast quality of the silence is palpable. Very slightly, utterly without warmth or humor and only for himself, Corvo smiles.

“As a matter of fact, I seem to recall that he said that if the other Isles blockaded us, he would participate.” At last Corvo turns, regarding Piras coolly. The man is practically cringing, pulled in as if anticipating a blow, his face twisted with alarm.

Beneath it, every bit as palpable: hatred.

“He said he _regretted the necessity,_ ” Corvo adds, folding his arms across his chest. “He was courteous. Lodged us in the Grand Palace itself. Gave us gifts to bring back.” He pauses a beat. “He wined and dined us, gave us gifts, and then in so many words he told us we could die bloody for all he cared. And now Serkonos is asking _me_ for help.”

“My lord,” Piras whispers. “That was a different time. Nearly two decades. We regret it most sincerely. Theodanis is dead, my lord, and Luca too as you well know—”

“I'd have quite a time forgetting,” Corvo says dryly, but Piras rushes on, and now his voice is rising, becoming both more desperate and more confident as if he's just hit upon another piece to bring into play.

“And it's your _homeland,_ Lord Regent. The city of your birth, your youth, now with blood running in the streets, the people terrorized, chaos reigning—”

“If Serkonans can't pull their shit together enough to sustain a moment’s peace, I can’t help them. Nor should I. And before you mention the silver, let me suggest you don't bother. Keep your silver, if you can even still get any out of the mines. We never needed it.” He shoulders past the man and heads for the desk, bends over it and shuffles a stack of papers as if he means to do something with them. “Your request is denied. You can leave.”

The silence is long, and as cold as the depths where the whales sing. Not aghast. Not even hateful. He doesn't look up, but can feel the weight of Piras’s gaze on him, and finally the edge of a flutter of movement as he gives Corvo a terse bow.

“My lord.”

“Piras.” He glances up just as the ambassador reaches the door. The man has partially turned to look back at him with a weak hand on the doorknob, his expression inscrutable, his eyes blank.

“What,” he says flatly.

No _my lord._ No _Lord Regent._ Not even _Corvo._ All pretense of form and diplomatic manners has been torn down and hurled away, and there's something satisfying about that. Those manners were always a lie, often a cover for nastier things—threats and manipulations and betrayals small and large; even in her day, even when the world wasn't half ruined, that was true.

So.

Corvo smiles again. Still humorless, still totally lacking in warmth, but now also sharp-edged, a slash across his face. There might be hate on his side as well, if he cared enough to feel it.

As it is, he's going to be honest.

“Tell them they can die bloody for all I care.”

Piras says nothing in response. He opens the door and slips out without another word.

~

It's only when his gaze flicks to the window and the pool of ruddy sunlight gathering on the floor that he realizes he's been in the study all day.

To be sure, he hasn't spent the entire time as he is now: in a high-backed chair in front of the fire, a half full tumbler of whiskey on a little table by his right hand and a cigar slowly smoldering itself into ash in its crystal tray. He's been feeding that fire—must have been, because there's no way it had sufficient fuel to sustain itself for so many hours. He dimly recalls moving around the room like a Jindosh automaton, shuffling through those papers on the desk without really reading any of what's written on them, consuming a bunch of grapes one by one until only the skeletal stems remained. Making another round of the bookshelves. Now that he tries to call up the memory, he sees himself standing in front of the tall clock behind the desk, attention caught by the pale blankness of the reflected window in its polished glass face.

It hasn't been wound. He doesn't know when it last was. It's motionless and silent, and essentially useless. Yet it's persistently there, waiting for someone’s hands to set it working again.

But now he's here, staring blankly into that dying fire, his legs crossed and his chin resting on his closed fist. Slight weight in his lap and the stippled leather of a book cover under his other hand; he looks down and letter by letter, the title registers.

_The Jewel of the South: On the Culture, People, and Recent History of the Isle of Serkonos._

A lake of blood spreading across the Grand Palace’s terrace. The body of a woman floating face-down in the surf, her head and limbs bobbing as she nudges gently against the shore. A corridor choked with bloodflies, engorged and humming sleepily in the oppressive heat, the brilliant crystalline crimson of their nest. A child’s corpse slumped in an alley, chest gaping open. Gunfire thunder. Screams. The air choked with relentless dust, people falling to their knees as it turns to mud in their lungs, crawling, coughing, blinded by grit and tears. The sun hammering down on all of this, red as it is now through the smoke and fog of a Dunwall evening.

 _They were your streets, once. Your beaches. Your rooftops, your back alleys, your warm nights and your music and your dancing, spice and wine on your tongue. Once it was all yours._

_You remember_.

He hurls the book into the fire. An explosion of sparks; then the flames creep across the cover and gnaw at the pages, and it blackens and flakes and begins to drift up the chimney.

A stab of pain through his back from his shoulders down to his tailbone, and he shivers.

Push past it. He mouths the words to himself, closes his eyes and the inverted flames lick at the interior of his lids. Push past it. Let them fight it out, pick up the pieces afterward if it seems worth the trouble. He has problems closer to home, and plenty of them.

They're getting closer all the time.

What happened last night won't go unnoticed at the Abbey, and they'll draw conclusions. They're likely already considering their next moves and they'll move as soon as they can, and if he’s not ready…

Perhaps he’s seen this coming for a long time. Perhaps it's better that it happen sooner than later. Especially if he wants to be able to present the Empress an Empire worthy of her when it's time.

He rises, makes his way back to the desk and sits down. Opens a drawer and slides out a fresh sheet of paper, picks up a pen and uncaps the pot, dips, watches the ink roll down the silver nub. Thinks for a moment. It's important to get this right. It's important to get everything right. A single mistake might be all it takes.

He sets the tip against the paper and begins to write in his small, spare, extremely neat script—the handwriting of a man without much formal education who has been forced to spend more time than he ever wanted trying to make up for it. 

> _My dear High Overseer Windham,_
> 
> _It occurs to me that, since my formal assumption of the title of Lord Regent, we have had little opportunity for a proper conversation. It would give me the greatest pleasure if you would agree to dine…_

The letter is brief and to the point. He signs it without a flourish, folds and seals it, presses his ring into the drop of red wax. A courier can have it on the High Overseer’s desk in less than an hour. Somewhat last-minute as invitations go, and the shrewd thing would likely be to refuse or reschedule. Buy some time. The assumption of walking into a trap wouldn't be a foolish one to make.

But Windham will be here. He’ll come.

Because he’ll know how this is done.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Something that Dishonored 2 addresses which I like a lot is the relationship of the two PCs to Karnaca - one a semi-ancestral homeland with which her father had an estranged relationship, and the other... the man who has the estranged relationship in question. There's a neat little colonialism Thing going on there, especially as relates to propping up an oppressive regime in order to sustain access to resources, and I wanted to explore some of the aftermath of that in a version of Corvo along these lines. What is he going to feel for a place where he did so much killing and so much destruction? Anything good anymore? Or only bitterness and contempt? 
> 
> So you end up with the other horror of colonialism: when the colonizer pulls out and washes their hands of the whole situation and leaves the nation to burn itself to the ground. 
> 
> Naturally that decision won't be without consequences.


	6. you look well suited like you came to win

What he finds himself thinking of, surveying the supper laid out on the low table by the fire, is Curnow.

Of all of them—except for Emily—the only one he saved. Whether it was a moment of stupidity or weakness or admirable mercy, or one of the very few loyalties left to him, he didn't know then and does not know now. He would love to have been able to say that at the time, it felt like the right thing to do. But none of it felt like the _right thing to do._ Nor did any of it feel particularly wrong. The truth is that _right_ never entered into it; six months of torture has a way of reorganizing one’s ethical framework.

He spared Curnow, _saved_ Curnow, and if asked why he thinks he would only be able to respond that it was requested of him, by someone who had no reason to expect he would be inclined to do her such a favor. She would have heard how he slaughtered his way out of Coldridge. She would have been aware that mercy no longer appeared to be an approach he employed.

But now he's not thinking of that mercy. He's not wondering whether or not it was the right thing to do. Curnow is thirteen years dead, killed in a riot shortly after Emily took the throne. If the decision ever mattered, it hasn't mattered in a long time.

He's looking at the food—roast potatoes and salted blood ox, poached whale meat drenched in a cream sauce—and the array of fine silverware and silk napkins, and especially at the bottle of chilled Tyvian white and the two glasses beside it, and he's thinking about the moment all those years ago when he stood in the office of the High Overseer and he hurled both glasses onto the floor, spilled the wine like blood, and retreated to the high shelf to watch and then to follow down, down to the secret room and finally to the murderous ending. Arranging it so that the thing would drag out, when he could have finished it in a few seconds. He's thinking of Campbell and what must have been going through his mind—did he look forward to watching Curnow die foaming at the mouth? Did he anticipate it with pleasure? Or did he merely regard it as a thing to be done and brushed aside?

Did it ever occur to him that he might be the one to die?

Did he consider himself untouchable by then? Innoculated by his collection of shameful information? Did he think he was immortal?

_You're not immortal, Corvo. You're not, and this man is dangerous. He’ll see you dead if he can. He's already tried more than once._

_Take care._

But it won't happen that way. Not like this, not tonight. Not over supper. For once, if everything goes as he's planned, no one here is going to die.

Not yet.

~

High Overseer Windham is a tall man, taller than Corvo, and imposing; his silver hair belies the age that his unlined face reveals. He's the youngest High Overseer in more than a generation. He is a ferocious zealot, with his own considerable list of dead to his name—all sacrificed to the cause of purity. His eyes are clear and scornful and sharply discerning, and when he enters the study and gives Corvo a brisk bow which he obviously doesn't mean, those eyes never waver. They pierce. They _see._

Corvo has seen the man at court before, was present at his installation, but never up close, and if he had any doubts before they're utterly silenced now. This man is incredibly dangerous, and moreover he won't underestimate. Anything. Anyone.

“High Overseer,” Corvo murmurs, returning the bow—courteous, always. “Thank you so much for coming. Especially at such short notice.” He gestures at the couch on one side of the table. “If you'd like to sit?”

Windham steps past him, scanning everything. No trace of a smile. “I have to say, I expected something a bit more… formal.”

The corner of Corvo’s mouth quirks, as if this is amusing and not remotely insulting. “I'm sorry to have disappointed you.”

“Not at all.” Windham sits, smooths his trousers. “I think there's a great deal to be said for a more intimate setting, especially when it comes to men in… our position. Don’t you agree?”

Corvo takes the seat opposite—the armchair usually placed in front of the fire—and leans over to uncork the bottle. The fire is built up, the flames leaping high, and it turns the pale hue of the wine to a deeper honey-gold. “That was my intention. This isn't a state dinner. I just wanted to have a chat.” He smiles again, minute and curved, and begins to fill the glasses. “Get to know each other a little better.”

“Get to know each other better,” Windham echoes softly, and takes the glass when it's offered. “I've gotten the impression that very few people know you at all, Lord Regent. Not in all the time you've been in Dunwall. Certainly not now.”

“I haven't made myself all that accessible, it's true.” Honey-gold lifted in the firelight, and the distorted glimpse of a man’s face through it. “To the Empire.”

“To the Empire.” Windham tilts his head slightly, keen eyes narrowed, his own glass still raised. “To the Empress.”

“Yes,” Corvo murmurs. The wine is cold and sweet, and it slides over his tongue and down his throat to lodge in his stomach like a ball of ice.

In his presence, an informal and unspoken rule has been made: _Don't speak of her. Don't ever._ Not even her name now; her title alone is like a slap in the face. He doubts he's betrayed any sign of what it's done to him, and Outsider knows—oh, yes, the Outsider most certainly knows—that he can't afford to show that kind of crack in the armor. But his back twinges and aches, his wrists grind, and in that moment he thrusts the decision home like a sword.

He is indeed going to kill this man.

Just not tonight.

~

Corvo Attano arrived in Dunwall possessing no great skill when it came to polite small talk, and in the years since then it's never been a thing he's seen fit to cultivate. It's not that he's bad with words; he's just fine with them, and whatever education he lacked in his childhood he made up for with self-instruction once he had access to Dunwall Tower’s extensive library. Indeed, he preferred and generally prefers reading to most of the social interactions he would have to engage in. Which is where the small talk comes in: Books, the best ones, have a point, have something meaningful to say, and even if they take some time to get there, he rarely comes out feeling like the experience was wasted time.

But there's an essential _pointlessness_ to this kind of chatting that he's always regarded with some degree of contempt. And he's never been good at it, and he's never tried to be so, whatever other courtly manners he's ever made an effort to acquire.

For _her_. What he learned, how he tried to fit into his place, it was always for her, though she never indicated that she expected it of him. He was by her side. He wanted to belong there. No matter how well they both knew that he never truly would.

Not that she belonged there either. Not really. Not all of her.

Saw it again, after she was gone. Saw it and so much of the rest of her, when he looked at what they made together, and every second he looked was torment and by no power in himself could he ever have looked away.

But now. Now it's the pointlessness of the small talk he and Windham toss coolly back and forth between them as they pick at food he barely tastes, but also this talk does have a point concealed beneath its surface, like a pin folded into a bland pastry. Viciously sharp. Both of them know. They're nibbling around its edges, waiting to see who takes the first real bite.

This is the first fight, of a kind, and it's going to set the tenor for all the battles that will follow.

The plates are mostly clear and the wine is at low tide when Corvo finally sits back and turns his glass meditatively between his fingers, regards Windham in the firelight and thinks _Fuck_ _it_.

No more small talk. No more circling.

“Did you think they would succeed?”

Windham starts. It's minute, nearly imperceptible, but watching him over the rim of the glass as he takes another swallow, Corvo doesn't miss it.

_First blood to me, you slick bastard._

“Whatever do you mean?”

“You know precisely what I mean.” Cool. Very casual, as if they never switched into a different mode at all and they're still discussing minor affairs of court or state or religion. “You made two attempts. Good attempts, I wouldn't say otherwise. But you failed, Windham. You failed, and you have to know that attempted assassination isn’t something I can overlook.”

Windham looks at him for a long time, head slightly cocked. Corvo gazes levelly back. He doesn't mind the scrutiny. Windham will see what Windham will see, and in fact none of what Windham is likely to see is technically untrue. There's no reason to blink.

And Corvo has looked into far more dreadful eyes than these, and hasn't averted his gaze.

“Surely,” Windham says at last, slow and quiet, “you wouldn’t expect that we could overlook this either. That I could overlook it. What you're doing.” He pauses a beat. “What you are.”

“And what's that?”

“A witch. A filthy blasphemer and a stain on the nation. On all of the Empire.” Windham flashes his very even teeth in the barest and most genteel hint of a snarl. “A traitorous usurper to boot.”

Corvo doesn't move. His hands are suddenly so tight around the glass that he almost thinks he could break it, drive shards of it into his palms. “I have a right to the throne in the name of my daughter, Windham. I have a right to keep her safe.” _I always have._ “You won't take that away from me. No one will.”

“You have a right to keep your daughter imprisoned? The rightful Empress, enslaved by the Outsider? She must be in his hands, _Lord Regent,_ you know that just as well as I do. Spirits know what he's doing to her.” Windham leans forward, sets his glass down on the table and folds his fingers together. His silver rings gleam. “Even if you do release her, even if you did this very moment, she may well emerge corrupted beyond recovery. And how corrupt was she already, I wonder? With a father like she's had?” A sickle-curve smile. “The Abbey has considered the direst possibilities. Did you give her to him when she was only a child? Have you been whoring her out to him her entire life? Is this merely the culmination of a long, long series of events, a road that could never have led anywhere but here? I wonder. I wonder that very much.” He lifts his shoulders in a dismissive shrug. “It makes no matter. We can't abide this. We won't. The Abbey is the true guardian of the morals of the nation, and believe me, Corvo Attano, we’ll stop at _nothing_ to see that mission fulfilled.”

“You’d overthrow me,” Corvo murmurs.

“Of course we would. We will.”

“What about her?”

“Emily Kaldwin,” Windham muses. “First of her name.” His eyes flick to the dying fire and their black centers glitter red. “I doubt we could let her rule either. Not at this point. Not with the danger she would pose.”

Corvo nods. A single nod, slow, and accepting, because none of this is even slightly surprising. Windham might be correct about one thing—really he might be correct about more things than one—which is that they've spent almost two decades on a road that never could have ended anywhere other than here.

“You've been watching me for years. Long before this.”

“We have. We could never prove anything, but we suspected.” Windham leans over to take the bottle, fills both their glasses with what's left. “You took on an army all on your own and you won. No mere man could do that, no matter how impressive.”

“Would you have tried to take me down even if none of this had happened?” Corvo asks softly. “Even if Delilah had never come?”

“Very possibly.”

“And Emily too.”

“If it seemed necessary.”

“I see.”

Wordlessly, they finish the wine. The fire burns lower. The room seems to be growing larger, the walls thinner, the edges of everything fractured and broken. Just outside the window, something screams; it may be a bird.

It may not be.

“So,” Corvo says finally. “This is it, then.”

Windham inclines his head. _Indeed_.

“I'm going to wipe you out. I'm going to kill every last one of you. And then I'm going to burn the Abbey to the fucking ground.” Corvo’s voice is low, smooth, not far from a purr. There's pleasure in this. There's pleasure in knowing that he's strong enough to do what has to be done, and there's satisfaction in the prospect of removing an irritant, eliminating a pest.

From the beginning, he disliked the Abbey. It didn't take long for dislike to harden into hatred. Now this is something beyond hatred. Enormous. Incandescent.

Windham smiles again. He doesn't appear remotely fazed. Corvo never expected him to be.

“I'm certain that you're going to try.”

~

“I’m just sorry I didn't take care of it before now.”

He's not in the throne room. He's not looking at her face, that cold contorted face that can't ever relax, the rigid lines of her body, the jagged spears of stone from which she seems to be captured in mid-leap. When he wants to talk to her, it's getting far easier to speak to that simulacrum he's constructed, which has gentler lines and a smoother face, and eyes that aren't quite such a terrible commingling of pleading and hopeless rage. He gazes into the eyes of this mental stone copy and he believes he might even glimpse understanding.

Forgiveness.

By sheer will he’s remade her into what he knows she must be.

_The world as it should be._

He cringes and hates himself for cringing.

He's not in the throne room, and he's not in his bedroom. He's in the safe room, in the little nook where she made a bed for herself—which he fully restored, not only in the most basic sense but to the way it was that day, down to the tiniest details that he can remember, which are a great many. The locations of half-read books, the precise tint of the lamps, a dropped cup, the pistol case, the fold of a blanket and the placement of pillows.

Her drawing of the Golden Cat. He never found it, after. He searched. He searched for hours, sacrificed days, lay awake at night wondering if it survived and was simply lost somewhere. In the end he took paper and colored wax and one night down here he recreated it himself from the clearest memory he could recover. He thinks he got close. But it's not right. He thought about things he had heard from scholars of ancient civilizations, that when you unearthed a ruin you were virtually assured to never get it out of the ground fully intact. But you do the best you can, and you look at what's left and imagine what it was like back when it was whole, when it was alive.

He pinned it to the wall, but now it’s difficult to look at it for too long.

The audiograph, too. The player is there where it was. But he never found the card. He suspects Delilah took care to destroy it. If she had played it, if she had heard the voice she hated more viciously than any other in any of her lives… She couldn't have done anything else.

It's better that way. He believes that it is. He could never bear to listen to it. But if it was here, he also knows that he wouldn't be able to resist. He would lie curled on this bed the way he is now, the warm, soft nest that still smells of his daughter, a hideaway that still feels like a place a young girl would make for herself, and he would listen to it over and over and over until his ears were bleeding.

Instead he lies here and he whispers to her. His version of her. The true version, not the lie his eyes tell him.

“Should’ve done it years ago,” he mutters. “We had a chance, back then. Campbell was dead and the hierarchy was weak, and I could’ve torn them to pieces. Could’ve even done it without spilling blood, maybe.”

Probably not.

“I was a fool. Spirits, I was such a damned fool. I'm sorry.” He grits his teeth, clenches his fists against his chest and digs his nails into his palms. The lamplight is a harsh crimson through his closed eyelids. “I'll take care of it now. _I'll make it right._ ”

_Will you? Will you really?_ Quiet voice, cool fingers. They stroke through his hair and he wants to whimper. _As the man said, you'll certainly try._

“For her.”

_Of course, only for her. Never for you. You've never wanted vengeance, that's not like you at all._ The sardonic edge is still quiet, but as edges go, it's sharp. _At least you understand now what you didn't grasp then. Years late, but you got there in the end._

He doesn't have to ask for clarification. “Nothing can be the way it was.”

_No, it can't. But you wanted to make it that way, then. For her. That part really was for her._

“The way it used to be…” He swallows. “It was good for her.”

_Not for you._

“No. I thought it was.”

_The wound was already festering long before your royal lover was cut down and you held her heart in your hands. The disease was already dug into the flesh. You were trying to recreate a poisoned world. Delilah did have one thing right._ There's a smile in the words, and to his mild astonishment Corvo realizes that it's a sad one. _You need to make some changes around here._

Corvo draws a heavy breath. His fists loosen. “I'm going to take down the Abbey.”

_Yes, you are. I've never been one to take sides and I've definitely never been inclined to adopt a direct role… But things change, don't they?_

The light pressure of hands on his shoulders, his back, his hair abruptly pulled hard enough to scatter sparks across his scalp and down his spine, and the memory of agony whips up from the darkness in his mind and scorches across his skin, and he bites down hard on his tongue and everything in him screams _Yes_.

_You're going to take down the Abbey,_ murmurs the Outsider. _And I'm going to help you._


	7. picture yourself in a room full of broken glass

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, let me just say that it is a fucking _trip_ to go from [the sweet funny sad INTENSELY EMOTIONAL corvosider fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18651547/chapters/44231866) I just finished writing... to this. 
> 
> Apparently I just ultimately hate joy. 
> 
> Quick note: Something happens at the end of this chapter that I think one _might_ consider dubious consent or even assault from one perspective. But the way it's written means I'm not going as far as tagging for it. Just be aware that it's there. 
> 
> Anyway, thanks for being here. ❤️

He wonders if he's beginning to hate the Empire.

Can't be the Empire he's going to make. It can't be the world he's going to gift to her, cleansed and put in order, that serves as the object of his hatred. How can he give her something that he hates? Yet he stands on the parapet, the cold wind rushing off the water and up the walls to rake its fingers through his hair, and he stares at the lights shining through the muddy clouds of smoke spewing from the chimneys of houses and factories, and he sees a city full of enemies, actual and potential, and he has no idea how he's supposed to feel anything but bloodless hatred for them all.

The Tower is set above the city as a whole. From here he can see Holger Square, the brutal stone block of the Office of the High Overseer, and he imagines it in flames, reduced to rubble, bodies strewn across the cobblestones and piled around decapitated statues. He should take pleasure in that fantasy. He doesn't.

He merely feels very tired.

When did he last truly take pleasure in anything? Real pleasure. Simple pleasure that didn't need to be watered in blood, that didn't involve the crisp, neat use of his body as he kills. This is all a job, a task he can't allow himself to enjoy, and in fact that part isn't taking much of his effort.

He has to push through it and see it done.

He wonders if the High Overseer is standing at his own window and gazing at the Tower right at this moment. If, not fully aware of it, they're looking across the rooftops at each other and locking eyes like fencers lock swords.

He supposes that he respects the man, after a fashion. At the very least he's no coward.

It's been nearly a week since their meeting. The week has been quiet and mostly devoid of event. He's been handling the more mundane work of governing, hearing petitions and reviewing assignments and ordinances, interviewing a couple of low-level clerks—because of course he now personally interviews everyone who works in or adjacent to the Tower—and as far as it goes he might be grateful for even the most fleeting distraction.

But in the end he's left with this. His weariness and the aches that haven't left him. The immensity of what he still has to do.

He's tried very hard to think as little of _her_ face as possible. Stone or flesh. It makes no difference in the end.

Flesh. It's perverse but more than once over the last few days he's wished that he was stone. Stronger than this. Not faltering. Jagged and sharp and thrusting into the world like the spires and mountains of the Void.

He turns from the window and makes his way to his chambers. He doesn't honestly expect to be able to sleep. But he’ll grant that it doesn't excuse him from trying.

~

He doesn't. At least not right away, and he was correct; sleep feels like it's an ocean distant and sailing against the wind. Coming to him as an expedition returning from Pandyssia, a crushingly long journey, an exhausted crew perilously short on supplies and bringing tales of something that will seem even more remote than before for all the stories’ fantastical nature. He strips to shorts and curls into bed, buries his face against his pillow and feels the war raging beneath his skin.

The natural philosophers say that from the moment of birth, death begins. Like a glacially slow wasting disease, it eventually consumes everything. He's an old man. How much of him has death already taken?

How much longer does he have?

The room is cavernous and vast. The sky is overcast and little light makes its way through the glass of the ceiling. He feels not only old but small, small and all alone, and it hits him that in all this week, after the Outsider vowed to help him destroy the Abbey, the black-eyed bastard hasn't once come to him.

And with disgust and horror, he realizes that the black-eyed bastard in question is now his only real companion.

That it's possible to _miss_ such a creature. Such a monster.

That it's possible to long for his company.

He’s been alone. One way or another he's been alone for most of his life. Even with Emily he was alone; there was so much he never told her, kept from her to keep her safe in a way that went so far beyond the physical; protecting the hopeful light he always saw in her eyes even in her most dour moods. She believed that no matter what he might have done, he was a good man. He couldn't bear to destroy that.

Jessamine was gone. The entirety of Gristol viewed him with, at best, suspicion. If only one person looked at him that way. Only one. Enabled a shred of a lie when he needed it most.

Gone now.

Maybe never to be regained. Even if he succeeds in what he's trying to do.

Those endless black eyes boring into him. Seeing everything, seeing more of himself than even he's been able to see. Can bear to see. Watching now? Sensing the sheer density of the loneliness that's overwhelmed him? Laughing at him? Amused, as he must always have been, by the suffering of the mortals he toys with?

 _I never laughed at you, Corvo. Never that._

Unbelievable. Impossible. The Outsider made sport of him then, and for all his offers of assistance and whatever else one might call what he's done, he has no real reason to believe that the Outsider isn't making sport of him now. Twisting everything Corvo attempts into a bad joke. No matter how determined he is to not fail.

He won't fail.

 _No, I think you won't._ A flicker of darkness in the corner of the room, a shadow that swells and swells, and the Outsider is moving smoothly toward the bed, his fingertips pressed together in front of him. _Yet I can't see that ending for certain. For once, I can't see. Not even the possibilities. I can deduce them, I can guess, but they won't play out for me. It's so strange._ He stops beside the bed and Corvo doesn't move—he remains on his side, gazing up at the Outsider from a single half-lidded eye.

“Why are you here now?” _Why only now? Why weren't you here before?_

The Outsider rolls a shoulder and cocks his head, bird-like. _This must unfold in its own time. I won't speed it up or slow it down._

“If you won't do anything now, let me be.”

 _But I came to help you in a different way._ His thin, sly smile. Yet somehow it looks—feels—less smug than it has before. Something new there, bizarre and unsettling. _I came to give you a gift. A small one, before the big ones arrive._

The Outsider’s gifts. He wants to laugh at that. Yes, because those gifts have served him so well in the past.

Except the hideous truth is that they have. He never would have asked for them, but they've served him with more vicious perfection than anything else ever could have. And if they made him a monster too…

Surely he couldn't have done anything else. Surely his hand would have been forced either way, Marked or not.

Slowly, moving as if his muscles are fragile and easily torn and he’ll wound himself if he's careless, he turns over onto his back, pushing himself up on one hand and pooling the sheets at his waist, and gazes up at an unlined, angular, and completely unreadable face. Those monstrous eyes.

“Give me whatever gift you have,” he growls. “Or leave me. Leave me until you're ready to help me do what I have to do.”

For a long moment, the Outsider does nothing at all—motionless, silent, like a statue himself. All around them the room shivers and fine cracks run through the walls and the floor and through them beams light which is the very antithesis of light.

The Outsider moves. Reaches down and ghosts his fingertips down Corvo’s jaw, over his chin, up to trace along the line of his bottom lip. Corvo releases all the breath in his lungs. The squeeze in his chest is almost unbearable. And the Outsider’s fingers are cold, so cold, cold enough to hurt him, all the cold of a nothingness so massive it's like an assault on the mind, and as if he's observing through the glass on the ceiling, Corvo sees himself raise a hand and close it around the Outsider’s wrist—

And hold it in place.

 _You always have to hurt,_ the Outsider whispers. _It always comes down to that in the end. Your rage, but before that, your suffering._

He cocks his head again, and if Corvo didn't know that such a thing was utterly impossible, he might have believed that the look on the Outsider’s face—abruptly legible—is consternation. Confusion. _Yet I'm looking at you now… and I don't think I can stand to do it to you. Not this way. Not without giving you one last taste of something better_.

The light through the cracks flares, and the Outsider flickers out like a candle, and Jessamine is there.

He's seen her so many times. Not only the translucent simulacrum of her issuing from the Heart; that was unquestionably the worst, although it was like the severing of a limb when she left him, but there have been so many other times. Dreams, dream after dream after agonizing dream, where everything is different and everything is better and he's fast enough, he's in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, and he drives his sword into Daud’s hateful body, again and again until he lies still. He's fast enough and he saves her and he holds onto her, and she doesn't leave him. He's seen it hundreds of times.

But it’s not always death, or the avoidance of it. Sometimes it's simple. A amalgam of so many memories, moments that could have been any time in any place and yet are each exquisitely unique—the sun glinting off the water and her hair, that half-hidden smile she always saved just for him when no one else was looking, her strong hands running up his bare arms, the way her eyes seemed to literally darken when she was sad or tired, watching her hold Emily in her arms and sway with her in a slow dance when she was fussy and refused to sleep, the perfect straightness of her spine when she sat on the throne, the straining arch of that same spine when he flipped her over and took her from behind, the full curve of her breast in warm morning light, her eyes squeezed shut and her teeth bared as her orgasm rocked her, her laugh, by the Void, only her _laugh,_ just that, it tortures him.

Waking glimpses of her. He'd swear to it. Out of the corner of his eye, in the corridors. In the throne room. In his bedroom. The shadow of her, flitting like a moth.

He hasn't seen her that particular way in so long.

Probably that's for the best.

None of those times were like this. She's not a ghost, or a fragment of a dream, or a trick of the light and his treacherous imagination. She's _here,_ utterly undeniable, standing naked by his bed, her skin creamy perfection and her hair loose and fallen around her shoulders, and she's gazing down at him with those fathomless eyes. He can feel the heat coming off her. He can feel it when he reaches for her and lays his hand on the swell of her hip, the thrum of the living blood in her veins. He can smell her when he lets himself fall helplessly forward and presses his face against her belly, the delicate scent of the rosewater she used. She combs her fingers into his hair and they're more real and more solid to him than his own damned body.

He tilts his head back and looks up at her, and when she smiles he knows she's forgiven him everything. Every sin, she's absolved with that smile. Every sin he ever committed.

All the sins he's going to commit.

 _For her,_ he would still protest desperately if she spoke, _it's all for her, you understand that, you have to, she's worth anything,_ but he can't speak because she's leaning over him and sealing her mouth against his, the indescribable _taste_ of her, his hands finding her breasts as she presses him down onto the bed.

It's a lie.

He knows this. He knows it perfectly well. As lies go, it's a flawless one; absolutely nothing gives it away except that he knows the truth, because the Outsider can spin anything he wants out of the substance of the Void.

He knows it's all a lie, and he holds her down and fucks her until she's wailing, pouring himself into her in thick, burning waves, and he doesn't care.

When everything is a lie, it doesn't matter anymore.

~

_Did you enjoy that?_

He's alone. There's no transition, no sense of her disappearing, no collapse of the air into the space she occupied; she's lying loose and exhausted in his arms, the salt of her sweat and the sharp sweetness of her cunt on his tongue, and then she's gone.

He turns himself away. He's not ashamed, that's not what this is. It would be beyond stupid to be ashamed at this point. He knew she was a lie; he knows the Outsider was watching every second of that lie unfold.

Taking any pleasure in it? The Outsider has always been a voyeur, but perhaps if you spend long enough as a voyeur, the spark of it fades and dies and it becomes merely another thing you do.

In any case, he doesn't give a fuck.

 _I hope you did._ The mattress dips behind him; the Outsider’s weight as he sits. He's real now, then. Corporeal. _I truly do, Corvo. I know you might not believe me… but I've never lied to you._

 _Which is why I hope you'll believe me when I say I wish there was another way to do this._

He starts to flip over at that—not fear lancing through him but maybe its harbinger—and the Outsider is seizing his arm in a ruthless, painful grip, fingers somehow sinking into him, and wrenches him onto his back, lunging down and in and over him. He doesn't have time to even attempt to struggle much less fight back in any meaningful way, and part of him is aware that the Outsider would be far too strong to resist anyway—and then that part of his brain is gone, crumbling away with the rest of him as the Outsider grips him by the shoulders and pins him down and slams their mouths together.

It's not being kissed.

It's being _violated_.

That cold again, that murdeous, dead cold, thrusting ruthlessly into him—not just his mouth but his nose, his eyes, ears, his cock and his ass, his _pores,_ ripping him open everywhere and flooding into his bones. He thought he knew what pain was. He had no fucking idea. It's worse than all six infernal months of Coldridge. It's worse than Jessamine dying in his arms. It's worse than standing in front of the stony, motionless form of his daughter and refusing to release her with his bloody hands. It’s an entire _universe_ of agony compressing itself into his body, and his lungs swell to bursting with the screams he can't voice, his heart expanding to crack open his ribs, his brain boiling away in his skull.

 _It has to hurt. It always has to hurt for you, Corvo. The rage, but first the suffering._

_It wasn't always like that for you. But you weren't always broken._

One final, ultimate surge of everything the Outsider is, a dead star exploding in the core of him.

Annihilation.

Breathing again.

Breathing against the Outsider’s mouth. The pain might as well have never been there; he can't detect a single trace of it, and every second it's fading like a nightmare, leaving nothing behind.

But that's not quite true.

The Outsider slides a tongue like an icicle across his lips in an obscene parody of playfulness, trembles for a second or two with what Corvo takes to be silent laughter—but when he releases Corvo’s shoulders and pushes himself up, there's no amusement on his face. Only something Corvo can't possibly name.

 _You can burn down the Abbey now,_ the Outsider says softly, and glides his fingers down Corvo’s throat to his sternum. _You can reduce Holger Square to ashes. Can't you feel it, dear Corvo? I gave it to you. Once I gave you my Mark. Now I've given you the fire of me._ He leans in one more time and grazes their lips together, and he’s no longer cold.

He's scorching. And ferocious red light is blazing through Corvo’s skin, illuminating the Outsider’s smiling face like a wash of blood.

 _You can burn down the world._

 


End file.
